Enterprise software systems are typically sophisticated, large-scale systems that support many, e.g., hundreds or thousands, of concurrent users. Examples of enterprise software systems include financial planning systems, budget planning systems, order management systems, inventory management systems, sales force management systems, business intelligence tools, enterprise reporting tools, project and resource management systems, and other enterprise software systems.
Many enterprise performance management and business planning applications require a large base of users to enter data that the software then accumulates into higher level areas of responsibility in the organization. Moreover, once data has been entered, it must be retrieved to be utilized. The system may perform mathematical calculations on the data, combining data submitted by many users. Using the results of these calculations, the system may generate reports for review by higher management. Often, these complex systems make use of multidimensional data sources that organize and manipulate the tremendous volume of data using data structures referred to as data cubes. Each data cube, for example, includes a plurality of hierarchical dimensions having levels and members for storing the multidimensional data.
Business intelligence (BI) systems may be used to provide insights into such collections of enterprise data. Many enterprise data storage models include hierarchies of categories of data. These may include hierarchies of time-based data (e.g., year, quarter, month), hierarchies of geography-based data (e.g., country, state/province, city), and/or hierarchies of product-based data (e.g., product type, product line, product item). Such hierarchical data in the data storage may be incorporated as dimensional hierarchies in data analysis models, such as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), in a BI system.